Page 21 of Rejected
“We have been preparing ourselves for this moment for months,” she went on. “Now, ladies.” They all looked at her somberly, expectantly. Jo might be the perpetrator of foolishness and theatrics, but she was always the one they all looked to for answers. “Are we up for it?”
As they had agreed on the day of Meg’s engagement, the three sisters got to work.
They took turns, Everyone sharing their favorite memories. There was talk of singing by Beth’s pianoforte, playing the heroines for their parents and a few intimate friends at their parlor-turned-theatre at home, dancing on the grass underneath a full moon, reading in a cluster by the fire so as to keep each other warm in winter, gathering flowers from the garden in the spring and splashing each other in the stream in the summer.
Jo struggled a little when she shared her favorite memories of her sisters—they all included Laurie as well.
She had known remembering would bring pain, but she had not prepared herself for the pain of losing him. It had blindsided her completely.
She herself had proposed this trip to the past. She knew that the sacred memories of their happy childhood could be poisoned if they weren’t careful—poisoned by loss, absence and nostalgia. But if they shared them and repeated them to each other, maybe they could keep the memories safe. Safe from the pain.
What am I without memories?
I am entirely made of them.
And they are all intertwined with sadness already.
No memory was clean, free of pain. None at all.
The memory of Beth’s pianoforte brought with it the empty seat with her last music sheet on it. The memory of their theatrics brought to mind the closed trunk of clothes Mama had sewn for them, laughing,as Jo and Laurie argued violently over the last dueling scene between Roderigo and his rival for the heroine’s hand. The memory of falling through the ice… Well, that had nearly ended in death too, but that was life in general, wasn’t it? Always a breath away from disaster.
Always an hour, a month, a decade away from grief.
One could not escape it, no matter how far one ran.
Everyone I love is going to leave me.
“I am losing you both,” Jo murmured, unable to keep her dark thoughts to herself any longer. Immediately she regretted uttering the words; she did not want her sisters to be burdened by them once they were happily away.
“Don’t be dramatic, Josephine, I’m only going to my honeymoon,” Meg said in her gentle voice, threading their arms together. “It’s perfectly natural for your life to change a little when you are married. You’ll see when your time comes.”
I won’t, Jo thought vehemently, but she held her tongue—a rarity indeed.
“We are going to be parted for the first time, and for a very long time. It hurts, Jo, I won’t deny it,” Amy said, in a rare show of emotion.
They held each other tightly, hardly noticing that they had lapsed into calling each other ‘Jo’ and ‘Meg’, names they thought they had left behind them when they came to London to become grown-up ladies.
Jo never found the opportunity or the courage to tell them about Laurie. She hadn’t even told herself yet. If she said it out loud, it would make it real.
My best friend is in love with me, she would say.Laurie proposed to me.They would look at her as if she’d gone crazy. But her next words would have them hating her:
I rejected him.
I lost him.
It was just as well that she didn’t say anything.
…
Meg and Sir John’s barouche departed shortly afterwards, and Amy was set to follow in a lavish carriage early in the morning. She went back to her own bedroom for a few hours of sleep and final packing.
Jo, left alone, her heart raw from their goodbyes, could not sleep. She had been given one of the best rooms, in the east tower. It overlooked the part of the grounds that contained a great, decorative lake, which was currently glittering with the reflection of starlight peeking behind dark gray clouds. Beyond the gates, a pale, angry dawn was painting the far horizon pink, but the room was still shrouded in thick darkness.
She lay down on the feathered mattress, but her eyes would not close. She watched the dancing yellow flame of the candle casting large shadows on the dark walls of the bedroom, until she thought shemight go mad. She got up in her nightgown to write furiously by the window, but even that could not ease the dull ache between her collarbones.
She looked outside, to the lake. The clouds had parted and it was silver with moonlight.
Alone, in this strange, spacious, London room, with Papa softly snoring down the hallway, and Amy packing her brushes and colors in her trunks for Europe, Jo wrote by the candlelight, ruining her eyes. She wrote and scratched the words out, staining her fingers, scrunching and throwing away the paper. She did not care. She picked up another piece of paper. Then another.
